A company which implements an Internet-based advertising campaign for an advertiser may track events and compute one or more metrics to measure progress of the campaign. For example, one of the metrics may be a conversion rate, e.g., a percentage of visitors who take some action upon visiting a website, such as purchasing a product in response to the presentation of an advertisement. The action may also include, for example, a user registration, viewing a given portion of the website, downloading a file, clicking on a hyperlink, etc. If a user executes a given action, a conversion is logged. By aggregating the conversions over time, the company may compute a conversion rate of traffic coming from different avenues that the campaign is utilizng. The conversion rate can serve as an indicator of an effectiveness of the campaign, a return-on-investment (“ROI”) for the advertiser and a rate other advertisers would pay for similar campaigns.
One technique that a campaign may utilize includes publishing links to the advertiser's website on related websites. For example, if the advertiser is marketing baseball equipment, the related websites may include web sites for soft drink companies, video game companies, etc. that market their goods or services to a similar market demographic as the advertiser. When a user clicks on a published link at a related web site and takes an action at the advertised web site (e.g., purchasing an advertised product), a conversion may be logged. By tracking the conversion rates of advertisements, a conversion rate may be computed for the published links to determine a value for publishing the link on the related website. However, the measured conversion rate may only be available from the advertiser's website. That is, the conversion rate can only be accurately calculated when it receives notice from the related websites of the conversions. Without the notice or the actual conversion information, a conversion rate must be estimated for an entire population of advertisers using one or more small, biased samples. Any sampling or estimation based on the biased sample, however, does not accurately represent the conversion rate across the entire population of advertisers.
Thus, there exists a need to provide systems and methods to extrapolate data from a biased sample set to estimate characteristics of a total population that includes the sample set.